Thoughts & Insights

Archaeological Excavations into the Future

A visitor to OUBEY’s studio some years ago, looked silently for some time and then said: “These pictures are like archaeological excavations into the future.”

He said that without any knowledge whatsoever about the intellectual background of OUBEY’s work, at a time when there was not yet a web site about OUBEY and his art, no book, no film, and certainly no OUBEY blog yet. It was a spontaneous expression of a feeling that emerged immediately when looking at the pictures.

In this spontaneously articulated thought in view of the original pictures, an essential characteristic deeply inherent to OUBEY’s pictures is expressed in a way that is both unusual and apt. What is seemingly taken for granted and effortless is conjoined here, which may appear at first glance to be an irresolvable contradiction. The strangeness of a remote past and the strangeness of future that is possibly even more remote, are connected in the present, specifically in the form of pictures that detach themselves in this way from time altogether.

They allow us to look into how we are cosmically interwoven by following our deep intuition about where we come from and where we are going. They express this intuition quite directly in a universal language that requires no translation. They leave the boundaries of language behind and the boundaries of time as well.

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